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In reply to the discussion: Post a line or 2 from a novel & see if anyone can guess the novel without using Google [View all]Just A Box Of Rain
(5,104 posts)September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her
father had called it thata dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for
forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and
moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone
fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust
motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown
inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine
blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into
which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound
before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she
had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew,
sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung
straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of
impotent and static rage like childrens feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed
voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the longdead
object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by
outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and
dreamy and victorious dust.